


Hearth and Home

by Midnight_Run



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: M/M, Moving On, Post-Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-07 07:02:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16849366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Midnight_Run/pseuds/Midnight_Run
Summary: In which the world moves on and they move on with it.





	Hearth and Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rethira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rethira/gifts).



> So I took the various mentions in your request, tossed them in a blender and this is what resulted. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Yuletide. :)

_“Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.”_  
― Tennessee Williams, Memoirs

+++ 

Delita Hyril has been a peasant, a soldier, a mercenary, a husband, a widower, and a king, but it wasn’t until well into his twenty-ninth year that he was able to add wanted man to the tale of his long fall from grace.

Though, he supposed, it might be far more accurate to say instead that being a wanted man was the first chapter in a new tale.

A tale in which he was no one special at all, just an anonymous thief for whose head the church had promised to pay a quite tidy sum.

Fortunately their reluctance to draw too much attention to their search worked in his favor, for while he might be a dead man walking were he to be found, such discovery seems increasingly unlikely with each passing day. Particularly given the pains they had taken to avoid attracting too much attention to the posting; as though his crimes against them were a mere inconvenience and they were willing to pay so handsomely for his life for no reason other than to see the matter over and done.

In truth, they need not have been so subtle in their efforts, he quite doubted anyone who saw him now would believe him the master thief the postings made him out to be, much less the King of Ivalice, rather regardless of how well the newly minted coinage of the realm had managed to successfully capture his visage. The common folk of the realm would never see their King's face but from a distance and most would know him only from those blasted coins so why would any liken that distant visage to the the man slumped beside them in the common hall or trudging down the road? Especially not when he was near a week out from his last washing, clad in mud-caked boots and a ragged, filthy, blood-stained cloak he’d stolen from the rotting corpse of a man he'd found lying dead at the side the road.

If he were a bit less soiled he might be completely unremarkable, but he can tell from the wide-berth the man gathered in the hall give him as he leans against the table and orders an ale and a bowl of stew with a voice hoarse with disuse that they will remember him long after he’s gone, if only by the stench. He counts out the small, dirt-encrusted coins he’s managed to scourge up carefully with quaking hands, pushing the coins across the table to the man who brings him his meal.

He’s hardly spent a season on the road and he barely recognizes himself and the life he'd lived before, true though he knows it to be, often seems to bear all the qualities of a long, strange fever dream from which he has just awoken and there is little reason to believe he will be recognized by some player in it at this late date.

Still, he has never been the sort of man to put his faith in the smiling face of good fortune, so during those rare moments when he wandered into an inn to warm up and quench this thirst he made certain to take a seat in the back of the common room with his hood pulled low and his fingers resting uneasily against the knife tucked in his belt.

He is sitting in just such a manner when he sees him enter.

No, _enter_ seems far too plain a word for the entrance he makes.

He _saunters_ in, part of a small knot of dusty travelers, all of whom laugh together with the ease of long acquaintance, and even if he had not gotten a clear look at his face as he strolled into the tavern, he’s certain he would still have been able to recognize him immediately just by the sound.

Ramza had always had a laugh as clear and crisp as the water that fell from mountaintops and the sound of it scaled his spine like the icy fingers of death climbing from the grave.

Was this how Ramza had felt, he wondered, when he had seen his back at the Monastary all those years ago? Was this how it had been for him? Had he been unable to tear his gaze from a familiar stranger’s form and face. Unable to move? To breathe? Able to do naught but stare as he smiled and laughed and clapped a hand down upon the shoulder of one of his companions with that familiar comradely grip that spoke of an intimacy made lie only by the distance between them as they signaled to the barkeep for ale.

It felt as if he’d taken a blow to the gut? No, not the gut, but the _heart_. As if an assassin’s blade home as he sat, frozen, old wounds that had never truly healed breaking open to bleed anew, as he stared at that back, _his_ back, as he walked away to settle in a distant corner, vanishing behind the crowd in the center of the tavern but for the occasional shine of golden hair beneath the flickering lamplight seen as men shifted and moved about their business.

If he left the tavern now, if he could not see him, could not hear him, would he be able to convince himself the sighting had been little more than the product of some bad bit of meat in the stew or too much ale?

He doubted it.

He would know him at ten thousand paces, across cities and seas, so to be able to identify him across a crowded common room was a trifle whether he be sick, drunk, blind or dead.

He could never mistake him for another, never mistake another for him.

Even in those days when her death had been a fresh injury and it had seemed the wounds it had left upon his heart would never heal and he would have sworn he never wished to see his face again.

Even when he had cursed his name and wished every memory of him scoured from his mind.

Even then.

Even now.

He wants to call out to him, to leap to his feet and stomp across the common room and snatch hold of that golden hair that fell in a single long braid down his back. To coil it around his hand and drag him from that place, haul him off somewhere quiet and secluded where he might pull from his lips the answers to all the questions that have been rattling around in his head during all the years between then and now.

But most of all he simply _wants_.

He wants as he has always wanted in that small, weak corner of his heart that is all that remains of the boy he had been when his hands had been clean and he had dared entertain foolish dreams of a life beyond the chains of class which would have always eventually ripped them asunder.

He wants to cross the distance of years and find him there, a boy again, each grieving their losses, cast adrift in the world by the cruelties of bitter boys and terrible men determined to see change take hold even if they had to crush a thousand little girls to see it done.

How many times has he dreamed of what might have been? Of embracing Ramza once more, truly, as brother or lover or friend, whatever role he might have allowed him, and leaving all his foolish dreams of power and change to men better suited to the game than he.

They had kissed once, as children, laying hidden together in the tall grass, inches apart and soon to join the brigade. The wind had been strong that day and they could hear their sisters calling them in the distance, but for the moment it it had been just they two and Ramza’s fingers had tangled with his own.

“It will not be the same,” Ramza had murmured, so close he could smell his morning meal, the tang of fruit, sweet upon his breath; could feel that breath blow warm against his cheek. “I shan't have you to myself any longer.”

“It's only for a few years,” he had replied, though each word had tasted of dishonesty, as his ambitions had been far larger than his station allowed even then. He did not know why he bothered to tell such falsehoods. Ramza had known the truth of him even then, he had been able to see that knowledge in the sadness that lingered in his smile, in the shake of his head and the quiet words he spoke to him as they lay together in the warm sunlight.

“You are meant for far greater things than I.”

He had been a boy, foolish and proud and already so caught up in his own concerns, but those words, spoken so sincerely had been all he wished to hear. And he thought he would never love him, never long anyone, more than he did in that moment, that single mad moment at the cusp of adulthood when Ramza’s words had stirred heat to his cheeks and an ache to his chest from which he would never fully recover.

Perhaps that was why he had surged forward and brought their lips together, a chaste and trembling touch, a first and a last to bring an end to carefree summer days, to childhood, to any possibility there had ever been of a clean break between them, though he had not realized that then.

In that moment, there had been only the warmth of Ramza’s lips moving so carefully against his own and Ramza’s chin held steady beneath the press of his trembling fingers.

Ramza had ever worn his heart upon his sleeve. Easily seen and easily broken and freely given, always, like his time and his attention. Like that terrible goodness that lived within him that longed only to do what was right.

To Ramza, sweet and golden-haired, child of privilege, that poor, brief interlude had likely meant nothing at all. It had been, after all, little more than a moment and Ramza had been loved by so many.

When he'd at last drawn back, Ramza had followed, eyelids heavy over eyes the color of summer skies, gentle and beautiful as a song. He'd been glad to let Ramza press him into the thick green grass, eager lips slipping gently across his cheek, his chin, the tip of his nose, before finally settling against his lips once more, soft and sweet as the breeze rustling the grass around them.

It was all he had never dared to dream of and as the voice of Ramza’s brother joined the chorus calling for their return, he had lain frozen beneath Ramza’s weight, mind swirling beneath the weight of the consequences of their indiscretion, horrified by the possibility of ruin.

What if they were caught?

What if they were _not_?

Ramza, cherished youngest son, knew nothing of the ugly price paid for such trespasses, or what fate awaited those who dared reach beyond their station, those whose desires corrupted the pretty sons of the peerage.

And yet, for all his fears, all his reservations, it had still been Ramza who had put an end to it, Ramza who had drawn back and away.

Ramza who had reached out and squeezed his fingers as if that grip were meant to convey a thousand feelings and words left unspoken, before rolling to his feet and calling to their sisters, to his brother, interrupting their pursuit, leaving him to lie there and gather his composure unseen and unknown.

How he had dreamt of that moment in the years after. Lying in a bunk above him in a room filled with the snoring, sniffling slumber of other cadets or pressed in close for warmth on the hard cold ground of campsites during those precious few weeks they'd served together.

Even later, when he told himself he despised him, his mind had still worried over those stolen moments, tracing the memory of each touch compulsively until they were all so deeply ingrained in his mind that he would never be rid of them.

How often had he allowed himself to dwell on thoughts of him? To be distracted by what was and might have been? Lingering in thoughts of them young and new? Or older and less innocent, their souls worn and tarnished by all they had endured, all they had done?

Too often to be certain.

It had seemed unbelievably pathetic that his heart should still so ache for want of a boy long dead and best forgotten.

He had never looked for him, not truly. Not during those first days when the whispers of the heretic’s triumph echoed down every corridor of the castle. Not in the years before Ophelia’s death and certainly not in the years after.

He did not wish to know what he hoped for. Even during those first days, weeks, months of fragile peace, he never sought word of him, never dared send anyone out into the world seeking rumors nor did he ever lend an ear to those who dared whisper a heretic’s name.

Slowly the world had forgotten him, it had moved on, as the world was wont to do. Memories were short and truth was what the church told them it was and he had been more than willing to go along with their narrative if only to save himself from knowing the truth of his fate.

And yet despite the passage of time and all his efforts, there was that boy, now a man, rising from his table in the far and making his way to stand at the bar in the common room of a shabby inn in a backwater town in the middle of nowhere.

It could not be coincidence.

He is up and pushing his way through the crowd before he can think better of it, his supper forgotten, something like rage bubbling in his chest. 

And then he is there beside him, snatching hold of the back of his tunic as he turns and meeting the bright blue gaze of a man who doesn't even have the decency to look surprised to see him.

“Sorry, lads, looks like I'm already spoken for for the night,” the man he knows to be Ramza calls back over his shoulder, as he pulls free of his grip, laughter in his voice as he moves effortlessly through the crowd and into the night.

They make it away from the inn but no farther before his patience with Ramza’s easy gait snaps and he yanks him unceremoniously into an alley between a recruitment office and some sort of general store. It's dark there and the shadows are deep and an unseen cat hisses protest, scrambling against dirt to remove itself from their path. He presses him against the wall of the shop, holds him there with aforearm against his throat and a knife pricking at his gut, all too aware of the blade prodding his side though Ramza’s sunlit smile remains unchanged. 

“Is that any way to greet an old friend?” Ramza asks, tilting his head to the side as he continues to stare at him with that pleasant, unreadable expression.

He wanted to tell him that they were never friends, that they were never anything like that, but he's long since lost his taste for lies.

“Have you come to kill me?”

To his surprise Ramza laughs and he feels the point of the blade drop away from his side all at once, “And here I thought you'd finally tracked me down in the interest of finally tying off your last lingering loose end. You were the one who put a knife in my belly and walked me out the door, Delita. I was just there to have a drink as I do every night around this time when I'm in town.”

“Where's Alma?”

Ramza’s voice grew cold, “Dead. Some two seasons past, influenza. She thought it funny something so mundane would be the end of her after she had survived so many horrors, but I suppose it simply shows that death comes for us all in the end. I wonder what she’ll say to find I met mine at the point of your knife after all this time.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“When have _I_ ever lied to _you_?” Ramza replied, voice soft, almost gentle, fingers sliding around the back of his neck. “I was sorry to hear about Ophelia. She was a kind person who deserved better than to be used as a tool to further the ambitions of hungry men.”

He doesn't say _like you_ , but the implication hangs heavy in the air between them all the same.

He remembers distinctly catching her weight as she slumped against his shoulder on her way to the ground, taking his ambitions, his secrets, his plans with her to the grave.

He was the hero, but her death and the wound she had dealt him before it would cast a shadow of suspicion and a whisper of scandal over his reign which would finally culminate in the church sending an assassin to his door and installing a replacement in his stead. 

He'd barely escaped with his life. 

Most days he's not the least bit certain why he bothered to run.

Survival was an old habit, he supposed, and difficult to break.

“Come,” Ramza sighed, “you'll stay at my place for the night.”

He should refuse. 

Should tell him he has a prior arrangement or perhaps a room waiting back at the inn, but he has neither of those things and his purse is thin enough that he can even pretend that prudence is the reason he follows him through the dark streets to a hovel near the edge of town. 

It is small, neat, and far cleaner than he might have expected had he thought to expect anything at all. 

He's not sure why that surprises him, Ramza might have been a nobleman’s son, but he hadn't lived as one for a long while even before that life had been lost to him for good.

They don't speak as Ramza retrieves a few blankets from the cupboard and lays them out for him near the fire.

“I’m leaving on the morrow for an escort job," Ramza comments, finally breaking the silence between them as they each go about removing boots and belts and preparing to collapse into their separate beds. "Fifteen days there and back again. You're welcome to make use of the house while I'm gone.” 

He has never been a heavy sleeper, even before he'd had to worry about assassin's blades, but when he wakes the following morning it's to the twittering calls of the birds whose shadows flit across the spill of sunlight cast long across the silent floor of Ramza's home and no sign of the man himself aside from a key left upon the table.

He stays.

He sleeps alone in Ramza’s bed and eats his meals alone in Ramza's kitchen and during those long days alone in Ramza’s home, he feels a constant intruder.

Still he stays.

He's not certain why.

On the fourteenth day of his stay as he is preparing to leave with a heavy heart and lead in his steps, there is knock at the door and he wonders briefly if this is it, but instead of the soldiers he is half-expecting, his visitor is a small boy with a crooked, gap-tooth smile and a letter clutched in his grubby fingers which he thrusts at him the moment he opens the door. The child as he runs off, leaving him fumbling with the letter and staring after him wondering if he should stop him.

The letter when he finally shuts the door and tears it open is short and to the point and in a hand he finds is still painfully familiar even after all these years. It is not addressed or signed, but he supposed that was probably for the best, they were fugitives in their own ways, after all. 

_I do not know how this letter will find you or if it will at all, but I hope it does. Perhaps I am a coward for not saying these words to you directly, but there has never been much honesty between us so I pray you'll forgive me this._

_As I mentioned upon leaving, I travel often. In fact, I am on the road more often than I am not, but I have never quite been able to convince myself to relinquish the idea of home. The comfort of having a place to return to at the journey’s end, come what may._

_I have no idea what you plan to do from here, what path you intend to tread in the absence of the one you chose all those years ago, but if you wish for a place to return to… this house can be that place for you as it has been for me, should you wish it so. Wheresoever your path should lead you, know you will always have this place to return to at your journey’s end._  

Ramza has always been a fool whose heart was too big and it seemed that, at least, had not been changed by the passage of time.

He should leave. 

Leave that small, warm place that belongs to Ramza and that village which might as well be his as well.

He should leave them both behind and never look back.

After all, he has nothing tying him there and every reason to keep moving and yet....

And yet the next day found him at the inn accepting an escort mission. A fortnight on the road in exchange for a sizable sack of gil and some strange trinket of no small historical significance that he is certain he could sell off later should he feel the urge.

He returns to Ramza’s home and collects his belongings, taking only what he absolutely needed for the journey and leaving the rest in a neat pile in the corner before dashing off a brief note:

_I’ve accepted an escort mission, I’ll be gone a fortnight. I leave my few meager possessions in your care._

He leaves.

He returns.

He finds a note on the table beside a round of bread and a small basket of apples.

_Expedition escort, be gone no less than seventeen days. Please make use of the food before it spoils._

And at the bottom, like an afterthought:

_Apples are not poisoned. If I wished to kill you, I could think of more certain methods._

He can not help but laugh.

He leaves again just before Ramza is meant to return, leaving behind his own note and a round of cheese he purchased from a traveling merchant.

_Monster hunt, five days. I have poisoned the cheese, eat at your peril._

It feels dangerous to leave such a jest and when he returns he half expects to find the door locked and barred against him.

Instead he finds a brief note and a small basket of berries in place of the cheese he’d left upon the table’s edge. 

_The cheese was delicious and your poison ineffective. You have no future as an assassin, I’m afraid, but decent prospects as a cheese merchant._

It feels like forgiveness.

Or as close as he’s ever to get to it.

He stares at the note for a long time, breathing through the pain it inspires in the old scar in his belly.

He leaves.

He returns.

Whether on purpose or by coincidence, they eventually begin to pass like ships in the night.

He stumbles in from the road to see Ramza's golden hair peeking out from beneath the blankets on the bed or wakes to find him resting upon the floor, head pillowed against his pack and the ever-growing pile of spare blankets one or the other of them picked up for just such occasions layered beneath him and wrapped tight around him.

What little they communicate is typically done through those notes and letters left upon the wobbly table in the kitchen.

_I'll be gone five days at least though I may be longer. Don’t forget to feed the goat._

_I have pressing business in Goug, I shall return when able. When did you get a goat? He ate all the flowers in the back garden._

_I'll be a fortnight traveling through Limberry. I've not the faintest idea where the goat came from. I quite like him, though I believe we shall have to raise the drying line if he plans to stay. He ate my shirt._

_The goat is a menace, I wasn't advocating for keeping him. I'll be in Sal Ghidos for no less than three days. There was mud everywhere when I woke this morn. Limberry must be rainier than I remember._

_It only rained once, but the blasted nobleman's carriage threw a wheel. Left us to salvage the carriage while he rode off on the only horse. Sal Ghidos must have been rough judging by the state of your face this morning. I've a quick delivery to run to Mullonde Cathedral._

_No rougher than usual. Had to go to the tavern to retrieve my pay from someone who was less than pleased to see me. Glad to see you've returned unscathed from your visit to holy ground. Heading back to Sal Ghidos for a delivery._

_I was glad to see you had returned safely and without incident this time. I'm off to Bervenia. There’s a bat in the chimney. I'd prefer if you didn't kill it._  

 _I didn't kill the bat. He moved on on his own._ _I will, however, kill the goat if he eats anything else of mine. He ate one of my boots yesterday._

_You shouldn’t have left your boot where he could get at it, I expect. We have door latches for a reason._

_The sunset was nice tonight. I’ve built a coop out back and purchased a chicken who I've been promised has a terrible temperament. I’m hoping it will kill the goat for me._

_ No such luck, I’m afraid. They seem to have become quite friendly. I've purchased an extra bed roll. You'll find it stowed beneath the bed should you have need of it. _

_I bought a scarf, but I don't care for it. You may make use of it if you like._  

 _I've bought new boots, but the old ones are still serviceable. Give them to the church if you have no use for them._  

He finds a note balled up in the trash, the words scribbled out, but still legible: _Do you ever think of those days?_

And he leaves his own behind, much the same: _Far too often._  

A year passes that way and then two, three, four.

He leaves and he returns and life goes on.

He keeps the letters, scribbles really, bundled together in a box beneath the bed, because for some reason he refuses to examine too closely, he can not bring himself to part with them.

It's a strange existence, to be sure, but he finds he is not unhappy.

He enjoys traveling and having a place to come home to and the comfort of the constant confirmation of Ramza's continued existence, in being able to imagine he can feel the impression he's left behind in the soft of their shared bed. 

He comes in weary one Winter eve, stomping the wet snow and mud of the road from his boots to find the lamps lit and a fire blazing in the hearth, a figure leaning in to stir the contents of the kettle hanging in the hearth, the scent of spices and meat heavy in the air. 

It's been nearly five years since the last time they'd met like this and Delita freezes in the doorway as if he's been caught out, staring at Ramza’s back, at the gleam of his golden hair in the firelight.

For a moment he thinks it might be impossible to speak at all, or that in doing so he might shatter this tentative peace that exists between them in written words and left items, all these ways in which they haunt the corners of each other's lives, that he should turn and walk away before he ruins it.

But he can’t help thinking that fleeing from this moment might ruin it just as well.

And he would rather stay.

Rather have his company.

Even if it were only for a moment.

“I… didn't realize you'd be here,” he muttered, uncertain of his welcome, but hopeful in spite of all his misgivings. 

Ramza doesn't startle as he half expects him to, but he does seem to hesitate before he turns to look at him, just for a moment, as if he is not the only one who has dreaded and longed for this moment, whatever might come of it.

He turns to face him.

They stare at each other across this room they've been sharing for the past five years and the distance feels far greater than it truly is.

"My last job wrapped up more quickly than expected," Ramza says, drawing himself up and he can see the dust of the road still thick across his cheeks and in the folds of his clothes. "Are you hungry?”

"Starved," he replies before he can think better of it and he is.

Ramza's answering smile warms him far more than the blaze of the fire ever could do.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I think this is finally complete as I’ve been ill so revisions didn’t happen in full prior to release, but I think I’m now finally happy with it. Ramza & Delita have been one of my favorite pairings since I first played the game years and years ago and it was a treat to finally have an excuse to write about them. Thanks so much for the lovely prompts and giving me the opportunity.
> 
> EDIT 3/22: To anyone who has read this previously: you're not imagining things, I do keep tinkering about with this and revising things, because I sometimes re-read my work and think of better word choices or find better ways to re-work some of my choices. That's just how I am. Sorry. ^^;; 
> 
> <3


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